12 hours Ago By Lewin Day
You can buy motorized camera sliders off-the-shelf, but they’re pretty costly. Alternatively, you can make one yourself, and it’s not even that hard if you’re kitted out with a 3D printer. [Creative 3D Printing] did just that .
Check it out in the video below. The basic slider is built out of 3D-printed components and some good old aluminum extrusion. A small 12-volt motor trucks the camera cart back and forth using a leadscrew.
It’s torquey enough and slow enough that there isn’t much need for more advanced control—the motor just does the job. There’s also a limit switch set up to trigger a neat auto-reverse function. The neat part, though, is the rotational mechanism.
A smooth steel rod is attached to the slider’s housing, which can be set up in a straight line or aligned diagonally if desired. In the latter case, it rotates the mounting on the camera cart via a crank, panning the camera as it moves along the slider’s trajectory. It’s a mechanically sophisticated design and quite unlike we feature around these parts.
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